


face your fear

by canticle



Category: Persona 5
Genre: ????? i just don't know anymore, Fear Play, Gunplay, M/M, Persona fucking, post-interrogation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-02
Updated: 2019-05-02
Packaged: 2020-02-15 20:49:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18677146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/canticle/pseuds/canticle
Summary: They come at night.Sometimes one, sometimes the other. Sometimes gloves red as blood, sometimes talons wide enough to encase his torso. Sometimes dark eyes and a mask white as bone, sometimes fire that bleeds and drips but never burns.They come when he can’t sleep, when the memory of the incident just a few nights ago makes it impossible to close his eyes for more than a few seconds. Hallucination or real, he can’t tell. He’s never seen Arsene in the real world. He’s never seen himself as Joker in anything more than the reflection of a window.





	face your fear

**Author's Note:**

> i've given up on trying to corral my muse, it just does what it fuckin wants now

They come at night.

Sometimes one, sometimes the other. Sometimes gloves red as blood, sometimes talons wide enough to encase his torso. Sometimes dark eyes and a mask white as bone, sometimes fire that bleeds and drips but never burns.

They come when he can’t sleep, when the memory of the incident just a few nights ago _(blood in his mouth and in his eyes and the drug running through his veins making everything syrupy slow, boot crushing down into his thigh and endless questioning and all the while the terror of imagining a gun to his head and a bullet coming home to nestle in between his ears)_ makes it impossible to close his eyes for more than a few seconds. Hallucination or real, he can’t tell. He’s never seen Arsene in the real world. He’s never seen himself as Joker in anything more than the reflection of a window.

Joker sits at the foot of his mattress and twirls a dagger longer than his forearm in motions Akira can mimic with machine-tooled precision. Arsene hovers in the dark, until his hands wrap around Akira, his torso or his head, cradling him with unimaginable delicacy. They’re the monsters that keep the other monsters in the dark away.

He unwrapped the bandages today, under Takemi’s dark eye. His ribs are mottled in ugly blotches of blue and green and purple and yellow. The scab on his lip and the ones on his cheek are still hard, crusted over. His thigh still throbs enough that making it down the stairs to use the bathroom is a challenge.

He hasn’t left his room, hasn’t left the attic, in almost a week. He hasn’t had visitors other than his night monsters in almost as long. They can’t congregate here like they used to. They don’t want to arouse suspicion. He doesn’t want to leave.

Something broke inside him that night. Something he didn’t realise was possible to break. His self-confidence, his hubris, his arrogance? He knew he was going to get caught, had planned for it, had laughed in Akechi’s face about it, but when it happened it was worse than he could ever have imagined, and now...the world outside is too big and too uncontrollable. The darkness of his room is the only safe space he has left.

That’s where the monsters are, after all.

It’s late, the sort of late night where time feels spun fragile as soap bubbles and nothing is real except the eyes that glow from the darkness and the pressure at the foot of the bed and his own slow, harsh breathing. The dagger spins on Joker’s finger, barely visible but for the barest flash from the blade when it catches the thin strip of light the window shade doesn’t block.

How they can be here, he doesn’t question. It’s the witching hour; it’s his imagination. It’s something that can’t be but is.

Joker turns to face him, stopping the dagger by its handle. “You’re still here,” he says, accusation in his words if not his tone.

Akira swallows. His mouth is dry. His water bottle has been empty for hours, but it’s easier to lie here in the dark than it is to haul himself downstairs and back up. “So what?” he asks, to Joker’s dissatisfied noise. “I’m hurt.”

“Not as badly as you were.”

“That doesn’t mean I’m not still hurt.”

“Not as badly as you could have been.” He’s implacable, his eyes as blank and his voice as smooth and passionless as a statue. “Not as bad as you have been before. Crushed. Burned. Frozen. Electrocuted. In fear of your life. In mortal danger. Two severed threads away from your last handhold on life crumbling. You’ve been through all this and more, and this is what you’ve been reduced to?”

He’s not wrong. All that and more, Akira has lived through in the Metaverse. “It’s not the same, though,” he says. HIs palm scrubs down his face. “It’s different. This is the real world.”

“They’re both real worlds,” Joker says repressively. “The cognitive and the physical, two sides of the same coin. What happens there echoes here; what happens here echoes there, like the beat of a drum. You have had worse there. Why does this affect you so much here?”

Akira can’t answer. He doesn’t have one, save for the fact that there _is_ one. Real humans did this, not metaphorical cognition-rooted abominations. A human man was the one to do this to him. A human adult man put needles in him, kicked him hard enough to crack his rib and put the print of his heel onto his thigh.

In the darkness, the eyes come closer, until Arsene’s form looms over him. In the darkness Joker stands, and Akira mourns the loss, until he comes closer, until his gloved hand slides under Akira’s chin and pulls it up up up until his throat is exposed, until his neck creaks. “So you’re going to stay in this bed for the rest of your life?” he asks quietly. Arsene’s head raises, the lights of its eyes moving upwards. “Forsaking others to save yourself.”

“I’m not,” he protests, weakly, softly. “I’m not.”

“You are.” Joker’s free hand strips the blankets from the bed and leaves Akira exposed, cold. He goes to wrap his arms around himself, vulnerable and uncomfortable, but suddenly Arsene is there, talons wrapping around his wrists, pulling his arms back up over his head. They cover every inch of the welting and the abrasions from the handcuffs. It hurts, but in a distant way. “You’ve lost sight of your true self. Your rage has banked and turned to fear instead.”

“No,” he says again, a denial, a complaint. Fruitless.

Joker kneels on the bed between his thighs. His hand rests on the bandage on his leg. “Yes. You are afraid. You are afraid of what you know, and you are afraid of what you don’t know, and you are afraid of what you don’t yet know that you don’t know. Your fear stagnates you. It chokes you.”

He pulls out a gun. His gun, Akira’s gun, Joker’s gun. Somehow it’s clearly visible even in the gloom. Akira’s heart rate picks up until his pulse pounds, until his breath goes shallow and sporadic. “You know me,” Joker says quietly. “You know who I am. You know I am thou, and yet you still fear.”

Arsene moves behind him, raising him upright on the bed until he sits vertically, his arms still encased, still kept prisoner high above him. He feels talons card through his hair; he feels pinpricks press into his cheek, pet across his face, stroke his jaw. He feels them curl around his throat, barely touching. It still makes him gasp, still makes fearful adrenaline shoot through his veins like ice.

No one had choked him in the interrogation room. The knowledge is faint but present. This isn’t something that should trigger this sort of fear.

“No,” Joker agrees, cupping his cheek almost tenderly. “Do you see? Do you understand? Instead of something concrete, your fear reaches out and touches all you perceive. It’s useless to you now.”

He picks up the gun. He presses it just as tenderly to Akira’s forehead. “You need something new to fear.”

As if given a signal, Arsene yanks his arms straight up, claws tightening around his throat until the pressure is unmistakable. Joker lowers the gun for just long enough to roll Akira’s shirt up to his armpits, tucking the hem into his collar so it will stay put, then easing his sleep pants down his thighs. He’s not wearing any underwear. What’s the use, when he’s not going anywhere? What’s the use when he has no visitors?

He’s always wondered what the gloves would feel like on his cock. They’re cool, strangely frictioned against his skin. He’s soft, but he hasn’t touched himself since well before the interrogation, and it’s almost embarrassing how fast he stiffens in Joker’s gentle grip. He almost thinks— but no, it’s gone almost as soon as he’s fully hard, and instead Joker’s hand moves between his thighs.

At the same time, Akira feels something slick and hard press against his back. “What,” he says, swallowing around the lump of terror in his throat, but Arsene drags him up, making him cry out as the abrasions on his wrists flare into hot pain. Joker presses himself against Akira’s front, the buttons on his vest cold against Akira’s heated skin as cool gloved hands slide between his thighs and hoist him up a little higher.

He feels the touch of something alien against his hole. “Wait,” he says, panicked, “I can’t—”

“You can,” Joker admonishes, and presses the tip of Arsene’s cock to him harder. “You will.”

“No, it’ll hurt, it hurts, it’ll rip me—”

“What are you afraid of?” Joker’s voice is as calm as Akira’s is frantic.

“It hurting—”

“You’re already in pain. What’s a little more?”

Akira can’t do anything but shake his head, trying to thrash away, trying to do _anything,_ but Joker holds him still and steady. “Your only fear is what you already feel.”

Even as Arsene’s cock slides into him (impossible, impossibly big and long and already slick, cool and hard and shaped so wrong, like nothing he’s ever felt before) Joker’s hands press into the bruises on his ribs, his torso. Everywhere he touches hurts like it did the night it happened, and Akira can’t keep himself from keening in pain. “We won’t let you run from it anymore,” Joker says. “You cannot afford the luxury. It happened, and it happened here. It happened. There is no changing the past.”

Somehow, every single centimeter of Arsene’s cock is seated inside him. He can barely breathe; it feels like it’s compressing his lungs, moving everything inside of him to make room. It’s too much, a bounty of sensation so _much_ it borders on pain. He’s so hard he’s leaking precum all over his stomach, he’s so afraid he’s on the verge of tears. “Please,” he gasps, not sure what he’s pleading for. “Please, I—”

Joker lays a single finger on his lips. “Shh,” he says, as it travels downwards, as it lifts his chin and strokes his chest and his stomach and his cock. “Shh. You don’t need to do anything. You don’t need to say anything.” The gun is cold where it presses into the soft skin below his ribs, sudden enough to make Akira whine. Like this, balanced on Arsene’s thighs, balanced on Arsene’s _cock_ , he can’t brace himself in any meaningful way. He won’t be able to move out of the way.

Joker’s hand strokes back up, replacing Arsene’s talons around Akira’s throat. The other hand maneuvers downward, doing something Akira can’t see, until— oh. Oh, no, no, he can’t take both of them, he can’t, it’s already too much, he can’t, no please please _please—!_

“Shh,” Joker murmurs against his mouth, his cock breaching in along Arsene’s until Akira thinks he’ll rip apart, until he wails thin and pitiful with whatever air he has left, until the tears breach and drip down his cheeks in long fat streams. “Give in to your fear.”

It hurts. It hurts like every wound is fresh, like his lip has just been split anew and every needle enters his skin and disgorges their contents at the same time. It hurts like a kick to the ribs, snapping them like kindling, shards shredding his organs as Arsene’s claws grip his hips, as that impossibly long, impossibly slick cock moves into him over and over again, carving out a space that only it can fill. It hurts like Joker’s teeth in his ear, the gun pressed just beneath his jaw as his fingers curve around Akira’s cock and tug. It hurts with an immediacy he can barely process, but he _has_ to, because every time he shies away from it the gun presses up harder, or Joker cocks it, locked and loaded and ready to send him to his final rest.

“I can’t,” he sobs, and “You _can,”_ Joker purrs as he moves with Arsene’s thrusts, as he palms the head of Akira’s cock, digs his thumb into the agonizing bruise on his thigh. “You can and you will and you must. You cannot live your life as a slave to fear!”

He can’t breathe. His lungs won’t work. The look in Joker’s eyes is bright and feral through his tears. He’s stretched out like taffy, faced with the reality he’s been trying so hard to avoid and it _hurts,_ why can’t they understand it hurts so _much,_ he never wanted this, he never asked for it, he never asked to be drugged and beaten bloody and raw, he can’t—

“You _can!”_ Joker snarls, pushing the gun into his jaw so hard his head rocks back, just as Arsene pulls him up a little higher, a new angle that sends sparks flashing behind his eyes and a long, thready wail out from between his teeth. “I am thou, and thou art I! Thou who was once willing to perform acts of sacrilege for thine own justice, denounce thy fear and rekindle thy rage!”

Pulled to his limit as taut as an overburdened fishing line, something snaps. Akira sees white.

He didn’t deserve this! He _didn’t!_ How dare they, how fucking _dare_ they go so far as to lay hands on him?! How dare they drive him so far into the shadow of his own mind that it’s taken this much to drag him back out into the light?!

Distantly, he’s aware he’s crying out with every thrust, jaw slack, tears drying sticky-tacky on his cheeks, Joker’s hand fisted around his cock as he comes, and comes, and _comes._ It’s overshadowed by the blinding, roiling sensation of _anger._

“Yes,” Joker hisses as Arsene pounds him harder, “where does your justice lie?!”

“Chained to hell itself,” Akira sobs, “though I be chained to hell itself—”

“Then we have heeded your resolve,” Joker says, and pulls the trigger.

 

When Akira comes to, it’s still dark. He hurts, like every bruise is fresh and every wound is raw. His shirt is rucked up to his armpits, the hem tucked into his collar. His sleep pants are bunched down near his knees. When he touches his stomach, his fingers slide through puddles and streaks of cooling cum.

It hurts to stand up; his back twinges, his hole aching. He shivers in the cold evening air, stepping out of his pants entirely. It hurts to walk; it hurts to hobble down the stairs and wipe himself clean with a handful of damp paper towels. He sticks his head under the faucet and drinks his fill, wetting his hands and wiping his face when he’s done.

Something’s broken inside of him. Something else is new. What’s happened in the past is in the past. What matters now is how he chooses to move through the present into the future.

On the way back upstairs, he grabs his plain grey hoodie from the coat rack near the bathroom. He needs a bath; if he goes late enough and keeps his hood up, no one should be able to see his face. After that…

After that, there’s a floor in Mementos he needs to reach, and one more palace he needs to explore.

Akira rakes his fingers through his hair and smiles, just a bit. In the dark reflection of the bathroom mirror, he thinks he sees a flash of Joker smiling back.

**Author's Note:**

> [come hang out at my twitters: caanticle is sfw, and](https://twitter.com/caanticle)   
>  [cantiafterdark is my nsfw twitter, and i don't allow anyone who doesn't have a clear birthdate/age in their profile to follow!](https://twitter.com/cantiafterdark)


End file.
